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In an unspecified place in the West
- With these public service announcements, we could denounce how gender and ethnic stereotypes lead to the violation of human rights and self-affirmation of the individual. We will reveal which stereotypes have been repeated over time in the representation of individuals, whites, bla... - reflects - blacks, mulattos - reflects - mixed race - reflects, someone interrupts -
- I don't know if the right path is to censor words.
- But we've always done it!
- Why did we eliminate the word negro?
- Because it is offensive!
- Martin Luther King used it…
- Fifty years have passed!
And we've probably overturned his message...
The reverend would not be happy.
Certain literature has the power to bring us back to nature, to reality, to truth, and within it reveals the ability of true linguists to observe the world and narrate it without any filters other than those imposed by the pact with the reader. It doesn't give a damn about censorship.
Here is a case.
An anonymous writer, hiding undoubtedly a man of culture (the book is full of scholarly citations), wrote in the Siglo de oro, right at the dawn (or a little before) of the dark Counter-Reformation age, a seemingly autobiographical story that tells of another Spain, that of Lazarillo de Tormes.
Lazarillo was born on the river Tormes where the mill was located, where his father, a miller, worked, and nearby where his mother was at the moment of childbirth. Young Lazarillo soon found himself living with only his mother, as his father was imprisoned for petty thefts and died in a holy war, and his stepfather (a black man who soon gave Lazarillo a half-brother, who quickly came to fear his father, as the little one saw Lazaro and the mother white, and himself not) did not meet a better end. One way or another, Lazaro, now a young man, is left to his first master, a blind man. This man would awaken him with jokes and scams, beatings and fasts, from the naivety in which he had lived for ten years. Clever, shrewd, stingy, petty, wretched, sly, cursed, swindler, and others are just some of the adjectives referring to the blind man. For this reason, he gave neither gold nor silver to the boy, but many pieces of advice to learn to live, advice that then, by the law of retribution, backfired against him. Lazaro then found himself a servant of a priest who in miserliness surpassed the blind man. Then of a squire, a victim of his own culture of honor and status, terribly poor and pursued by creditors. And then again of a papal bull seller, a sacristan, and a bailiff, in a path that would finally make him a king's employee, a friend of powerful people, and, despite everything, the husband of the priest's housemaid…
...the society observed from this unusual principal point of view shows all its inconsistencies that stand out thanks to a trenchant and cynical satire and coarse humor made of continuous repartees, jokes, scams, and immorality, which find justification in the pursuit of a better social position within a society where the struggle for survival is fierce. However, in this new position, the rules change, eyes close to avoid observing reality and Lazaro's words become ambiguously sweet: he now deals with "respectable people," Lazaro, and respectable people must be addressed with ambiguous politeness: and even if the wife frequents too often the archpriest's house, one remains "Lordship" and the other is still a good girl…
Thus, like Lazaro, our society behaves, deciding every day to lose the words and with them the contact with reality.
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